Kenneth’s aunt showed all the interest of someone spotting a gadfly on the wall—until suddenly, her arms shook and she struggled to maintain her balance. “St-st-stop it, you absolute miscreant of a boy!”

  In her fiendishly large arms, Kenneth was struggling against her hold, kicking his feet as he craned his neck to look back at where Ricardo lay, groaning in pain.

  “M-Mister Rick?” Kenneth yelped, his eyes wide, his entire face flushing with colour and animating with emotion.

  He stared at Ricardo for a moment, then looked back up at his aunt, who scowled at him. But not before briefly, for a split-second, making another expression that Lucy barely caught.

  A deer-in-the-headlights expression of shock, fear, and embarrassment.

  In that fleeting expression, familiarity struck Lucy, followed by the electricity of sudden revelation. Her own uncle, while not quite as extreme, had also been very strict with Lucy, and she complied due to the belief that he was wise and correct and thus doing everything for the sake of improving her. But when she grew up and realized that he was also inflicting pain, to a much more severe degree, to other people—including and especially Lucy’s own mother—that unassailable image Lucy had of her uncle quickly disintegrated.

  Perhaps that was what this aunt feared: that Kenneth would come to the same sort of relevation, and her absolute hold over him would crumble to pieces.

  “Kenneth,” Lucy called out to him. The aunt immediately whipped her gaze to Lucy with daggers in her eyes. Lucy gulped, not knowing if this would have any effect at all, but still she said to the boy: “Mister Rick is hurt because of your aunt. She did that to him. And she laughed while doing it.”

  Kenneth stared at Lucy, his eyes and mouth wide, then directed that same gaze up at his aunt. She reeled back, that fleeting expression from earlier now stuck to her face like glue.

  “Don’t—don’t listen to a word they say!” she barked down at the boy she struggled to hold in her arms. Her overall stature appeared to be smaller than it was moments ago. “They’re nothing but lowly entertainers! What do they know?”

  “You were so nice to us earlier,” said Lucy, “but now you’re dragging us down like this? Kenneth, do you see how rude your aunt is being toward me and Mister Rick?”

  “Auntie…” Kenneth fumbled restlessly in his aunt’s arms.

  She grit her teeth and tried to steady him, but eventually gave a sustained yell of frustration and set the boy down hard on the floor so that he lost his balance and fell on his behind, looking up at her fuming expression.

  “Listen to me, you worthless whelp.” The aunt’s skin turned red, her words doubled by a lower, infernal, inhuman distortion of her usual voice. The fires on the counter top grew so large they melded into one grand conflagration that roared like a dragon at the aunt’s beck and call. “If you ever want to be a human being deserving of respect and forgiveness, you will obey me and only me. Not these half-wits derailing everything I’ve built up for your own pathetic sake!”

  Kenneth, still sitting on the floor, his small figure nearly engulfed by the dragon of flame, continued to stare up at his aunt. His wide eyes and anguished grimace undoubtedly expressed fear, as anyone would before this infernal giant of a woman. But Lucy saw something in his expression, something slight that spoke of a significant shift. Where there was deference in Kenneth’s face and body language, an inclination toward bowing his head and averting his eyes in shame, now his eyes were sharpened with disbelief and even a hint of disgust, staring up at this fiend who had clearly injured his friends.

  The same fiend who, Lucy knew Kenneth must realize now, had hurt him far, far more without any of the objective reasons she espoused, but for the sheer thrill and enjoyment she was very much expressing now.

  And his aunt, for all the theatrics of intimidation she put on right now, appeared to realize this as well, for she budged not one inch from where she continued to glare down at her nephew. At a certain point, her ferocity revealed itself to be desperation, like a haunted house worker trying to scare a child who saw through their facade.

  She shrunk more and more, sweat running like rivers down her face and neck as the dragon of fire at her side no longer appeared to be an ally.

  Lucy gripped her Ideal, feeling that this might be her chance. She shot Ricardo, still lying on the floor, a quick glance, and he gave a quick and definite nod.

  But when Lucy looked down at her sword, and imagined thrusting it into the aunt right in front of Kenneth, she hesitated. She thought back to how she had seen the bakers both plunged through with Diana’s spear, and how Keilani had covered Kenneth’s eyes. Most likely Keilani, ever quick-witted, had thought of that on the spot after hearing Diana’s plan, and if she hadn’t done that Kenneth very likely would have been in a much worse state.

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  Lucy’s thoughts raced. She didn’t want to ignore Keilani’s example and put Kenneth through a traumatic sight, but at the same time she needed to cause real, immediate damage to his aunt, enough to at least stop her from doing something far worse to Kenneth. This last thought caused her eyes to drift to the counter top, where the dragon of fire had shrunken back down into four separate fires rising out of pans—and that was where Lucy’s curiosity and intuition whispered an idea to her.

  Lucy ran over to the stove and picked up one of the pans. She recoiled a bit out of instinct, expecting it to be scalding to the touch, but surprisingly it was only about as hot as a cup filled with hot water. She thanked the gauntlets protecting her hands and forearms for that.

  Lifting up the pot, Lucy ran back to where the aunt loomed over Kenneth, drawing both his confused and curious look as well as her confounded glare. But before she could shout anything, Lucy thrust the pot out toward her, at first seeming like the target was her face, but then angled slightly to the side.

  To the giant’s long curtain of hair.

  “AAAAAAAAAGH!”

  Sizzling and hissing filled the air, then it only took a split second for the flames to leap from the pot and catch onto the left side of the aunt’s hair. From there, it spread over the crown of her head and over to the back and right side of her hair with such speed as to rival a wildfire coursing through a dry, dead wood.

  She continued to scream hysterically, flitting her gaze about in a panic until at last she spotted her salvation: the sink. She bolted to it, her rapid stomps and high-pitched yelps sounding like a cartoon character hobbling away for dear life, turned the faucet on to the max, and dunked her head straight into the waterfall that poured from the massive faucet.

  This was enough to abate the fire at the top of her head, but her long ends required more work. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” she repeated over and over again as she struggled to grab hold of her long locks of burning hair and bring them to the water.

  Lucy sighed in relief. In truth, she wasn’t sure if this plan would result in Kenneth’s aunt being harmed in a more gruesome, full-body way, but she hoped that Kenneth had enough recollection of cartoons to make the scenario more lighthearted than it could have been. So far, it was looking as comical as she had hoped, and Kenneth seemed to think so as well as the queen, still desperately racing to stop the burning, was rapidly going through a major change.

  She was shrinking further.

  When at last she stopped splashing water onto herself, Kenneth’s aunt turned back to Lucy and Kenneth, nostrils flaring and eyes out for murder. However, this was counteracted by her significantly reduced stature, her figure even seeming to have thinned and shrivelled up, along with her hair—or what remained of her hair—being a mess of uneven clumps and burnt wisps.

  “You imbecile!” she shouted at Lucy. “You’ll pay for—”

  As she spoke, she moved her head vigorously to go with her wild gesticulations, and this had the unintended effect of causing what little remained of her hair to shirk off and fall softly to the ground. Her fully exposed, bald head shone ever so brightly in the light of the three remaining small fires behind her.

  Kenneth laughed.

  He was still sitting on the floor from where his aunt had rudely dropped him, but now he was doubled forward clutching his chest as his voice gave form to bright, unabashed laughter.

  Lucy smiled, realizing this was the first time she had seen Kenneth happy.

  Across from him, his aunt acted completely oblivious to Kenneth’s laughter, as she knelt down and clutched at the piles of burnt hair on the floor. Dropping her head, she sobbed, though her voice was drowned out by Kenneth’s.

  “That was awesome!”

  Lucy whipped around to see Ricardo bounding over to her with a grin. He looked good as new—until he got within two steps of Lucy and clutched at his lower back with a groan and a grimace.

  “Hold on!” said Lucy. “Are you sure you should be moving right now?”

  “I-I’m all right,” said Ricardo, “Mostly. I think the shock from the impact earlier did a number on me, but my Understanding alignment will patch things up to stop anything from being serious or permanent. So I’ll take things slow for a while…but that ain’t gonna stop me from giving you one of these.”

  With a smile, he held out his palm in front of Lucy. Lucy gave a small chuckle, then brought her own hand out and high-fived him.

  As she brought her hand back down to her side, Lucy looked at her other hand to find that she was still holding the pan and the fire burning within it. They were all still here, in this recreation of Kenneth’s aunt’s kitchen, but there was another place that needed to be addressed far more urgently.

  “Wait,” Lucy said, “it’s too early to be celebrating.”

  “Right,” said Ricardo, his gaze saying that he had come to the same realization. “But how do we get outta here?”

  Lucy had an idea she didn’t know would work, but she figured it was their only shot at this point. And there was no time to hesitate about it, not when Kenneth’s aunt was still with them and could regain her composure at any second.

  “Kenneth,” Lucy said, going over to where he was sitting and calming down his breath after laughing so much. “Do you remember Miss Diana? She’s in trouble and we need to help her.”

  “Oh. Oh!” Kenneth’s eyes lit up with realization. “You and Mister Rick are going to help her, too?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy, “we promised we would.”

  This was, of course, a lie, for she and Ricardo had been transported into the stained glass windows before any of them could speak to the dumbfounded Diana left stranded in the church. But they had made a promise—to rescue Kenneth, for good—and bringing them back there in order to face the queen was imperative to that goal.

  “Okay,” said Kenneth, “I want to see Miss Diana.”

  He closed his eyes, and Lucy felt her heart race a little wondering what would come of this.

  “Foolish, foolish, foolish child!” Kenneth’s aunt, still groveling on the floor, but now facing Kenneth with the look of a predator eyeing prey that had already gotten away once. “All that you did to my hair, I’ll do the exact same to you!”

  She lunged forward—and froze in mid-air.

  A crinkling sound like thousands of glass beads filled the air. Kenneth’s aunt rapidly lost form and depth and shadow, becoming an assortment of flat shapes that shattered, came apart, and floated up into the air.

  Glass.

  As Lucy and Ricardo looked all around themselves, they saw the entire space around them disassembling into shards of glass that floated upward, into a distant white light. The light was formless, but Lucy found it oddly comforting to look at.

  The ground, too, crystallized and gave away, and Lucy was once again falling through the fabric of Dreams.